Behind the Scenes @ Wild Apricot: Like Ducks to Water - Feb 22 to 26 at Wild Apricot

Lori Halley26 February 20100 comments

One thing I love when I go out to the country is watching ducks. Luckily the lake I go to has a family of them that comes by every year (I've named the youngest of them "Tobias Loon Jr"). I enjoy going out in the morning when it's nice and calm, sipping a coffee and watching them gracefully slide across the water.

I try not to think about it too much because I know under the surface is something less beautiful: little orange legs and webbed feet furiously paddling. That really destroys the illusion of something being peaceful and graceful, but it's also very necessary that something like that happen so that it CAN be so peaceful and graceful.

The same is true here at Wild Apricot: while it might look warm and friendly in our application, behind the scenes our little duck legs are going as fast as they can churning out new features and improvements.

Our developers have finished creating the features that we plan to release in version 3.4. Now what starts is a month of intensive testing of the site. When we do this, we don't just test the new features but test the entire site from top to bottom to make sure that everything works well together. This means that our testing cycle is almost as long as the time spent actually building the features, but it also means that the launch of the new version will go that much smoother.

I'll be posting more as we get closer to the release date, which right now looks like it will be in mid March 2010.

That doesn't mean that our developers are sitting idly by. Right now they're working with our analysts on nailing down some of the features for the next version of Wild Apricot. During the past month those analysts have been looking at your suggestions and feedback and identifying candidates and designing them. We're still working on what will be in the next release (as well as the ones after it), but we have posted some descriptions of what we're thinking of doing. We'd love for you to take a couple of seconds and check them out:

I'd also like to let you know that we've changed the focus of the Roadmap a little bit. It still have a list of the issues that are currently being developed, but also the things that we plan to do in the next 12 months. It's a great rolling window into our long term goals for Wild Apricot.

That's it for this week. Next week I'll have more from Behind the Scenes. Until then, keep paddling, duckies!